The Next Big Thing in Technology 2015 by K.D Rose

I love Tech. I love keeping up with it, though not necessarily using it (iPod anyone) and I’m more on the side of keeping up with the big movements in Tech (see physics and some kind of material and how they have intercourse and someone figures it out.) Nevertheless I feel a dearth. Sure, we have the Apple watch now but that’s just a rehash of something, making it smaller. Like turning your Rubik’s cube another direction.

Speaking of apps, what is the “next big thing” after Snapchat that is probably many apps behind, except I am too out of the loop to know?

I could get into someone finally bringing interactive holograms to iPhones or some such. Personally, I’d rather be moving things in the air than squishing my finger to on a touch-screen. More like conducting an orchestra of media in front of your face with your arms and hands. Fun. I mean it looks so easy in the movies. News stations have funny looking makeshift hologram thingamabobs that sometimes seem to work. Of course, they are incredibly cumbersome and awkward when the newscasters use them. Oh well, can’t have everything.

I mean we do need something that is at least a little paradigm shifting don’t we? (Really, aren’t tablets going to be the Eight Track Players of the decade?) Come on. Admit it.

Don’t know what an 8 Track was? Sigh. Just think of what Facebook is to you now.

For me personally, sometimes I’m simply looking for the next thing that suddenly I learn I didn’t know about. First it was Vines, and now Snapchat, and ok, there’s Scriggler and other underappreciated upstarts too in a flooded market. But now what? What happened? Teens are busy on Tumblr and whatever came after that, which I wouldn’t know. But Vines and Snapchat seem old even to me. And that is a problem. Is there a lull in the frenetic social media connectivity brain trust? Which University has some hidden cache of the next generation secretly playing with the new media darling? WHERE IS IT?

Well you know Phhhoto is pretty damn new because Jared Leto only has 753 followers. Just saying. Never said my methods for discernment were scientific.

But truthfully, I’m talking about real Tech or at least a new software program (probably developed by laughing, geeking college students somewhere about to be rich out of their minds.) I mean Hawking now harps on how we’re all going to basically die. Neil deGrasse Tyson is off chatting with celebrities. Elon Musk is busy in space, or umm cars, or umm subway hyperloops. I dunno… something from that brilliant, well-funded mind of his.

There are some celebrities that are usually up on Tech but I’ve heard nothing lately. Ashton Kutcher, known for being very involved in Tech, is busy being a papa. Leto has Vyrt and a million other personal techno things but don’t know which of his interests if any are coming to big-time fruition (interest in others million-dollar ideas that are feasible, desired, and funded= big time fruition).

It seems one transformative, but, and I want to be clear about this, *not* paradigm shifting new item- is coming. It’s here, just not viable yet, and that is Self-Driving Cars. Don’t scoff. They will be around and used in someone’s lifetime who is alive at this very moment. However, in my standards, even this is a cultural shift, not a paradigm shift. Computers were a paradigm shift. Interestingly enough, the main money-maker and tech quandary for the self-driving car will probably be the microprocessor or whatever technology that acts as the “brain’ for the car. That is until someone comes up with a really simple idea to outfit the car with some kind of tech that everyone wants and jumps on the bandwagon. Then it’s a free-for-all.

Like I said, self-driving cars, if adopted into the US or World culture would be a ginormous technological and cultural shift. But not a paradigm shift. (And when you think about it, it does diddly for solving the over-polluted highways in major traffic centres and by extension, quality of life from that mess. Take the word of someone for whom two-hour commutes was a complicated daily operation.)

Why are we working on taking millionaires to space but we can’t come up with a flight pattern for commuting that somehow involves single propelled air something or other. There is where the room is to commute. Lanes up above (but below planes). Or something. Is anyone thinking 3-D? Besides 3D Systems I mean, whose plastic creations are still being brainstormed and printed into who knows what else.